Think Tonk

Thursday, November 13, 2014

On a natural way of drawing the line
between the internal and the external, knowledge is an externalist notion.Knowledge requires a proper fit between
appearance and reality, so the stuff knowledge is made of isn't just in the
head.It might seem clear to you that p, you might have strong evidence for p, and you might reason as carefully as
anyone can in concluding that p, but p still might be false.If, however, it seems clear to you that p, you have incredibly strong evidence
for p, and you reason carefully in
concluding that p, isn't there something good about believing what you
do?If all the available evidence
supports p, it might seem
unreasonable for you not to believe p.If that's right, maybe it's just the stuff in
the head that matters to rationality.

The
gap between appearance and reality is a potential threat to knowledge, but it
doesn't seem to be a direct threat to rationality. Consider the new evil demon
case.[1]Your non-factive mental duplicate is deceived
by a Cartesian demon. Everything you see and remember, they seem to see and
remember. Everything that strikes you as plausible strikes them that way, too.
You reason in just the same ways. You draw all and only the same conclusions.
In spite of this, there are vast differences in what you know. In spite of
this, there doesn't seem to be any difference in how rational your beliefs
are.This suggests that neither the
presence of the appearance-reality gap nor the things on the far side of it
have any direct bearing on what's rational to believe. Perhaps this is because
the absence or presence of such things doesn't have any direct bearing on
what's intelligible from your point of view.

A
natural explanation as to why rationality supervenes upon the mental is an
evidentialist explanation. The reason that facts about your mental states
wholly determine whether it's rational for you to believe a proposition is that
facts about your mental states determine what evidence you have and evidential
support relations determine what's rational for you to believe.If your evidence provides sufficiently strong
support for your beliefs, they're rational. If they're rational, it's because
they're supported to a sufficient degree by the evidence.

This
evidentialist explanation is not uncontroversial, but it's not unpopular either.There's been a debate about whether your
evidence supervenes upon your non-factive mental states, but I'd like to
bracket this issue we haven't paid enough attention to the second part of the
evidentialist explanation.Should we say
that rational beliefs are rational because the evidence provides sufficiently
strong support for them? Even if we grant that rationality supervenes upon the
evidence, this is a stronger claim, a grounding thesis. It's not clear whether
we should think that it's true.

I
don't think it is true. We shouldn't think of epistemic rationality as merely a
matter of strong evidential support.My
target is an evidentialist view with three core commitments:

1.Dependence:
If you rationally believe p, you have
evidence for p that provides
sufficiently strong support for p.

2.Priority:
The possession of evidence for p is
independent from and prior to the rational status of your belief concerning p.

3.Structural
Sufficiency: If you have evidence for p
that provides sufficiently strong support for p, it's rational to believe p.[2]

Structural sufficiency says that there's
a reason why the evidence plays the rational role that it does.By providing a level of support that crosses
some sort of threshold, the evidence makes it rational to believe what's
rational to believe. We should reject structural sufficiency.It's possible for two propositions to receive
the same level of evidential support where it's rational to believe only one of
them. Thus, strong evidential support isn't the stuff that rationality is made
of.

The
argument against evidentialism will be indirect. I will present a puzzle about
rationality, discuss three potential solutions, and show that we have to reject
evidentialism to solve the puzzle.

2.
The Puzzle

There's been considerable debate recently
about (putative) rational requirements such as these:

L: If t
is a ticket for a fair lottery that hasn't been drawn with more than 1,00,000
tickets, you're rationally required to believe that t is a losing ticket.[3]D: If you acknowledge that your peer
disagrees with you about whether p,
you're rationally required to refrain from believing p.[4]

The arguments can pull us in different
directions. I've changed my mind about L. When this happened, novel
considerations seemed to give me good reason to change my mind. The optimist in me thinks that they could have
made it rational for me to believe L. The pluralist in me thinks that my
opponents could have had strong evidence for their views about L, mistaken
though they were.

If
we suppose that it's possible to have evidence that supports L, it should be
possible to have evidence that provides a sufficient level of support for L:

The move from (1) to (2) seems
plausible.Just as we know that there are
features of your perspective that can make it rational to believe you have
hands by making it seem that you have them, don’t we know that there are
features of your perspective that can make it rational to believe L by making
it seem as if L is true?

Bearing in mind
what L says, let's suppose I give you a ticket for a large, fair lottery.Let p
be the proposition that your ticket is a loser.Since you rationally believe L, this seems to follow from (2):

3. You rationally believe that
rationality requires you to believe p.

With this belief in place and with its
blessing from rationality, it's hard to see how rationality could then require
you to refrain from believing that the ticket I just gave you is a loser, so we
have this:

4. You rationally
believe p.

Here's
the turn. All that I've told you about L is that you have sufficiently strong
evidence for it. I never said whether it was true or not.It wasn't:

This is the puzzle. It's hard to see how
rationality could require you to believe and refrain from believing the very
same proposition, so we have to give something up.

3.
Three Responses

Consider three responses to our puzzle.
The first starts from the idea that features of your perspective make it
reasonable to believe things generally. By making it rational to believe L,
they thereby have an effect on whether it's rational for you to believe lottery
propositions. According to the perspectivist,
rationality requires a mesh between your beliefs and your beliefs about
rationality:

Enkratic Requirement: Rationality
requires that you don't both believe that you're rationally required to believe
p and refrain from believing p. [6]

If features of your perspective make your
beliefs about rationality rational, they'll help to determine whether it's
rational for you to, say, believe lottery propositions.They accept (1)-(4) and reject (5).

The
Enkratic Requirement implies it's not possible for certain kinds of mistaken
beliefs about rationality to be rational:

Fixed-Point Thesis: If you believe that
rationality requires believing p,
this belief is either true or rationally prohibited.[7]

This is a surprising consequence and some
people don't like surprises.You might think
that there can be rational mistakes about just about anything.The best evidence might be misleading. If it's good enough evidence, it might make
mistakes reasonable.If you think strong
but misleading evidence can make it rational to form mistaken beliefs about
rationality, you're an incoherentist.[8]
The incoherentist thinks that there can be rationally acceptable 'mismatches'
where rationality permits refraining from believing p even if you rationally believe belief is required.Incoherentists think it's fine to stipulate
that (5) is true. They reject (4) and try to show that (1)-(3) doesn't support
it.

Objectivists agree with the
perspectivist rationality requires you to be enkratic.[9]
They disagree with the perspectivist about the rational significance of beliefs
about rationality on our first-order attitudes. Objectivists think that we
should think of the requirements of rationality as independent targets our
attitudes aim to hit when we're thinking about rationality. When our beliefs
about rationality miss their targets, they’re irrational.This means that beliefs about rationality are
different from beliefs about the weather, but this is a difference we have to
live with.The facts on the bottom place
constraints on what's rational to believe about rationality. They reject (2).

4.
Perspectivism

Perspectivists try to solve the puzzle by
denying (5) on the grounds that it conflicts with (1)-(4). They deny that we
can specify the rational requirements that apply to you without taking any
account of your perspective.The
internal connections between your perspective and your beliefs determine
whether they're rational and determine whether something like L applies to you.Let's start by looking at two arguments for
perspectivism.

The
intelligibility argument starts with the observation that a rational response must
be intelligible from the subject’s perspective. Suppose a subject’s options
always contain at least one rationally permitted option. Rationality couldn’t
reasonably require you to refrain from believing, refrain from disbelieving,
and refrain from refraining. Suppose that your evidence strongly supports the
belief that you're rationally required to believe p.If so, you might think
that if the subject believes that she’s rationally required to believe p, this belief is rationally permitted.
Suppose, that's right and that's what she believes.Which of the following options would be
rationally permitted?

It isn’t intelligible to suspend or
disbelieve in light of the belief that believing is rationally required, so (1)
and (2) fail the intelligibility test.Thus,
if one option is rationally permitted, it's (3). Perspectivism is vindicated.[10]

The
second argument for perspectivism is the evidentialist’s argument. Evidentialists
say we should respect all the evidence, including higher-order evidence.Suppose, if only for reductio, there's a
counterexample to perspectivism.The
counterexample would have to be a case in which (a) you rationally believe that
you're rationally required to believe p
and (b) believing p isn't rationally
permitted.Feldman (2005) thinks this is
impossible. If (a) holds, there's sufficient evidence for believing that you're
rationally required to believe p. If
(b) holds, there's not sufficient support for believing p.The trouble with this
description of the case, according to Feldman, is that the evidence that
supports the epistemic belief and ensures that (a) is met is evidence that supports
the first-order belief p, in which
case (b) isn't met.

4.1
A Response

Feldman overlooks the possibility of
having sufficiently strong evidence for an anti-evidentialist view of
rationality, such as a view on which you can be rationally required to believe p in the absence of evidence when such a
belief is desirable. While such a view
strikes us as implausible, there still could be subjects that believe it on
strong evidence.We don't know what
happened in William James' basement. Maybe he locked students away in cages and fed
them a diet of gruel and arguments for the claim that rationality can require
belief in the absence of evidence.If their
evidence supported such pragmatist views, the evidentialist should recognize
that these views were rationally held. If so, evidentialism says that these
subjects would rationally believe that they were rationally required to believe
p even when they knew that p wasn’t supported by evidence. The
level of evidential support for p wouldn't
be sufficient for rationality, not even if the belief that p is rationally required was supported to a sufficiently high
degree. Evidentialism predicts
counterexamples to the enkratic requirement, so there's no good evidentialist
argument for perspectivism.

We
can see the views are in tension if you imagine reasoning as follows:

Suppose that, in keeping with evidentialism,
you know (P2). Suppose, however, that you have strong but misleading evidence
for (P1). Evidentialists and perspectivists agree that you rationally believe
both premises, in which case they should agree that you could rationally accept
(C). Since (P1) is false, there isn't sufficient evidence for p.The evidentialists should say, then, that the argument’s conclusion is
false even if both premises are rationally believed. Perspectivists have to accept the argument’s
conclusion and reject the evidentialist's dependency thesis.

The
perspectivist objection overgeneralizes and threatens to lead to a kind of
epistemic anarchism on which there aren't any
principles that specify the conditions that determine what's rationally
required of all rational subjects. The second objection to evidentialism applies
to any view that says that there’s at
least one rational requirement with these two properties:

To see this, it seems possible that a
subject's evidence could provide arbitrarily strong support for (a) false
propositions about the rational significance of C or (b) false propositions
about whether C obtains. Under these conditions, perspectivists should say that
what's rationally required isn't what the putative principle states, so the
perspectivist would say that the principle is spurious.It seems to be a pretty weak requirement on a
theory of rational belief that it recognizes at least one rational requirement
that meets both conditions, so I have real worries about perspectivism.

Epistemic anarchism is a rather
troubling view because it seems to conflict with some independently plausible
claims about rational requirements. These requirements are supposed to be
categorical requirements that have rational authority over all thinkers
regardless of what attitude they take towards them. They're supposed to tell us
what kinds of things have rational significance and what their significance is
and so it seems that denying that there are such principles comes at tremendous
cost.

There's a truth in the neighborhood of the
evidentialist's priority thesis that we mustn't forget. Thoughts about rationality don't make things rational, not even when
backed by evidence.Consider the
relationship between a subject's attitudes about fitting emotional responses
and fitting emotional responses. We don't think that part of what determines
whether anger or joy is fitting is a subject's attitude towards whether it's
fitting. Having strong evidence for your theory of fitting emotional response
wouldn't make it rational for you to
be angered by the sight of animals enjoying a bask in the sun, not even if that
followed from your theory.If rational
belief is anything like a fitting response to accessible features of your
situation, we should likewise be skeptical of the suggestion that the fittingness
of such doxastic responses is determined
by beliefs about rational responses.[11]If rational support doesn't flow down from
evidence for beliefs about rationality to the beliefs you take to be rational,
either rationality doesn't care about whether your higher-order and lower-order
attitudes mesh or the constraints that apply to the lower-order attitudes apply
all the way up.

5.
Incoherentism

Incoherentism is a natural choice for
evidentialists.If strong evidential
support for beliefs about rationality doesn’t invariably trickle down to
provide evidential support for beliefs we think we’re required to have,
shouldn’t we reject the enkratic requirement?The incoherentists think so. They think that structural sufficiency
shows us that there are counterexamples to the fixed-point thesis, cases in
which there’s sufficient evidential support for believing false propositions
about the requirements of rationality. Since arguments against the fixed-point
thesis are, inter alia, arguments
against the enkratic requirement, the incoherentist thinks that we can solve
the puzzle by rejecting this requirement. By doing so, we can retain (5) and
retain (1)-(3).[12]

Unfortunately,
incoherentism is hard on our intuitions. Consider a dramatization of an
exchange between you and your epistemic conscience:

EC:
Let's start with the bad news.These are
the results of your periodic epistemic evaluation.A lot of your first-order doxastic responses
we've flagged for irrationality.Do you
want to start with omissions or commissions?You:
Omissions.EC:
Fine. You don't believe p.You:
That's right.EC:
Right, I know you know that.It's
irrational.You're rationally required
to believe p.You:
That seems right to me.EC:
I thought you'd say that. You don't seem to remember, but I told you the same
thing on the last three visits. And yet, here we are. Look, if you don't agree
with my assessments, just tell me. I'm starting to worry that you don't take
this seriously.You:
On the contrary! I take this very
seriously. I agreed earlier and I agree with you now.EC:
So, what gives?If you agree that it's
irrational for you not to believe p,
why are you just sitting there? Why don't you get up and change your mind?You:
I'm not sure that that's called for. I agree that it's not rational for me to
refrain from believing p. I believe
that. Really, that seems obvious to me. I just don't know what change is called
for.EC:
Is that because you're waiting for the good news? We've run the tests and your
beliefs about rationality are all fine.You:
Oh, I expected as much. I'm certain that my higher-order beliefs are all
rational.EC:
I've lost the thread. You agree that it's irrational for you not to believe p. You agree that it's rational for you
to agree on this point. You acknowledge that you don't believe p. You just don't yet see that this
calls for any sort of change.You:
Right.EC:
Should we continue with these evaluations?You:
Yes, of course we should, they're very important.

When you discover a mismatch the
discovery should be the beginning of
of epistemic self-assessment and revision, not the conclusion of it.If,
however, the incoherentist is right, your akrasia might be just the thing
that's keeping you in line with the requirements of rationality. In the
exchange with your epistemic conscience, you don't seem very reasonable, so
it's hard to see how maintaining your akratic position could be preferable from
the point of view of rationality than alternatives in which you conform to the
enkratic requirement.

There's
a further reason to be uneasy about this idea of rational epistemic
akrasia.Suppose someone believes
evidentialism.Suppose she has
sufficient evidence to believe that she's rationally required to believe p but she doesn't believe p.She violates the enkratic requirement.Incoherentists should think that it doesn't matter to the rationality of
her relevant attitudes whether she knows that she doesn't believe p or not, so let's say that she knows
that she doesn't believe p.[13]
If she's aware that she doesn't believe p,
it seems to her that she cannot settle the question whether p.While she takes the question to be open, she thinks that there's not
only evidence that supports p, it requires her to settle the question
whether p in a particular way.It's hard to understand how she could (a) rationally
take the question to be one that she cannot now settle if (b) she also thinks
that her evidence rationally compels her to settle it in a particular way. If
you judge that your evidence rationally compels you to believe that the correct
answer to the question whether p is p, wouldn't any reasonable person take
that question to be closed?[14]The mindset of this person is opaque.It's hard to see how rationality could
sanction such a mindset. If rationality
requires you not to knowingly violate
the enkratic requirement, it should require you not to violate it at all.

6.
Objectivism

Objectivism is the best of a bad
bunch.Because objectivists recognize
the enkratic requirement, they avoid objections to incoherentism.The argument from perspectivism to epistemic
anarchism assumed that the internal connections between features of a subject's
perspective and her attitudes about rationality wholly determined whether those
attitudes were rational. The objectivist doesn't think that such internal
connections are sufficient on their own to make the relevant attitudes rational
because they don't guarantee that they'd hit an independent target.The argument for epistemic anarchism is
blocked from the outset. We solve the puzzle by denying that (1) establishes
(2).

Doesn't
this point to obvious problems with objectivism?The only defenses of the enkratic requirement
and fixed-point thesis appeal to contested intuitions or arguments that support
perspectivism. One might reasonably worry that objectivist responses to the
puzzle are ad hoc. What's worse is
that objectivism seems to conflict with some platitudinous claims about the way
that the features of our perspective make our beliefs rational.Doesn't the intelligibility argument rule
this view out?

Objectivists
have to respond to these worries. Let's start with the intelligibility argument.
It rests on two assumptions:

Intelligibility Thesis: If f-ing is a rational response to the
situation, f-ing is an intelligible response to the
situation (i.e., one that makes sense from the subject's point of view).[15]

Availability Thesis: In any situation
there's at least one rationally permitted response to that situation.These imply that in any given situation
there's at least one response that's rationally intelligible.

Without the
availability thesis, the intelligibility argument won't go through.The success of the argument depends upon
whether we can run an argument by elimination to show that once you rationally
believe p to be rationally required,
believing p is rationally permitted
on the grounds that alternatives aren't intelligible.

One
thing the objectivist could argue is that the theses don't pair together
terribly well. Think about the possibility of muddles, situations in which none
of the available options is intelligible to someone.If you're guilty of some gross rational
failing, can't you arrange things so that none of the available options is
intelligible? If so, the intelligibility thesis is at odds with the
availability thesis.

We
can revise the availability thesis to avoid this:

Modest Availability Thesis: If you find
yourself in a situation and this isn't the result of some rational failure on
your part, there's at least one rationally permitted response to that
situation.

The weakened thesis doesn't support the
argument for perspectivism. Suppose you and a peer disagree about L in that you
think that we're rationally required to believe lottery propositions and they
think that we're prohibited from believing them.If you both judge, in keeping with your
views, that the lottery proposition is one that you're rationally required to
believe or prohibited from believing, objectivism says that one of you will
find yourself in a situation in which there are no rationally permissible
options when it comes to the lottery proposition.If you cannot intelligibly suspend on whether
p when you believe belief to be
rationally required, suspension and disbelief would be ruled out. If you are on
the wrong side of the debate about L, however, belief would also be ruled out.
This doesn't threaten the Modest Availability Thesis, however, because if
you're the one who's wrong about what rationality requires, objectivism says
that you're in the bad situation as a result of a rational failure on your
part.Objectivists might be fine with
the idea of perplexity secundum quid even if they reject the idea of perplexity
simpliciter (i.e., they might reject the idea that there are no permissible
options when you're guilty of some sort of wrong even if they think that when
you do no wrong there must always be at least one permissible option).

But,
you might ask, where's the rational failure? You've followed the evidence and
the evidence suggested that L is true. How can this be a case of rational
failure?The objectivist says that this
is a case of perplexity secundum quid because mistakes about the requirements
of rationality are rational failures.

This
is only satisfying if we have a defense of the fixed-point thesis. Titelbaum suggests that the thesis might be
correct because we all happen to have propositional justification to believe
the truth about what rationality requires of us. As he puts it, the reason that
the 'justificatory map' is arranged in such a way that we don't have
justification for believing falsehoods about the requirements of rationality is
that "every agent possesses apriori, propositional justification for true
beliefs about the requirements of rationality in her current situation"
(forthcoming: 21).

Is
this convincing? If justification is a matter of strong evidential support, the
suggestion is that the reason it's irrational to form false beliefs about what
rationality requires is that we all have strong (undefeated?) evidence for the
right views of rationality.Is this
plausible?The possession of evidence
for any particular view depends upon contingent facts about a subject's
psychology. Changing a subject's mental states by presenting new arguments that
she finds convincing can change a subject's evidence. Haven't some of us had
evidence for L and later had evidence that weighs strongly against L?

Titelbaum's
explanation assumes we have assets we don't have.My explanation of the fixed-point thesis
focuses on liabilities, not assets.
Consider an example. Suppose your accountant watches while you fill in your
forms for the IRS and he tells you that you ought to take certain deductions
and report certain kinds of income in specific ways. The result is that you
lose money you could have saved and you break a few laws. Meanwhile, a neighbor
does their taxes in just the same way you've done working on their own. Your
neighbor isn't competent at handling this kind of situation. Their actions
manifest this incompetence. What about your accountant?I'd say that he manifests the same kind of
incompetence and shows himself to be incapable of managing the situation even
though this incompetence is manifested in his beliefs about what you should do
rather than the actions that manifested the neighbor's incompetence.Both have shown themselves to be insensitive
or unresponsive to the relevant features of the situation in spite of their
awareness of them.

A similar point applies when it comes
to handling reasons/evidence. Rationality requires an understanding of what's
required when reasons apply to you. If your first-order attitudes violate
rational requirements (e.g., by believing on the basis of the wrong kind of
grounds or on the basis of insufficient evidence), you'll manifest the kind of
incompetence at handling reasons that merits the charge of irrationality.If instead you judge that you should form
beliefs that happen to violate these requirements, this judgment reflects the
same incompetence, the same failure to discern what a situation requires of
you, that the first-order irrational belief did. Since this failure is what
makes for the irrationality of the first-order attitude, it makes the belief
about rationality irrational. This is why mistaken beliefs about what
rationality requires of you are themselves irrational beliefs.

The
fixed-point thesis isn't true because we all happen to have evidence for the
right list of rational requirements; rather, it's true because the grounds for
saying that someone's attitudes are irrational is that those attitudes reveal a
kind of incompetence with respect to handling reasons and their demands.

7.
Objectivism and Evidentialism

There's a quick argument from objectivism
against structural sufficiency. A source (e.g., testimony, apparent rational
insight, reasoning) might provide evidence that R1 and R2 are both genuine
requirements of rationality. Suppose only
R1 is. If the support is sufficiently strong in both cases, structural
sufficiency tells us that it's rational to believe both to be rational
requirements. The fixed-point thesis says, however, that it could only be
rational to believe one to be a rational requirement. Thus, according to the
fixed-point thesis, rationality isn't simply a matter of having sufficiently
strong evidential support.

If
rationality isn't simply a matter of strong evidential support, what is
it?The principles that capture the
requirements of rationality have application conditions that pick out
conditions that matter to epistemology much in the way that, say, a law's
application condition is connected to some value that the law aims to
protect.If you're aware of the relevant
condition but aren't moved in the way the principle states you're required to
be, this manifests a kind of unresponsiveness to the relevant value, de re unresponsiveness.[16]The objectivist sees this kind of
responsiveness as essential to rational belief formation.If rational beliefs are irrational because
they're de re unresponsive, we have
an explanation of the enkratic requirement and fixed-point thesis. Just as the
first-order belief that, say, some ticket lost might count as irrational
because it's not properly responsive to epistemically relevant features that
call for certain responses, the belief that you're rationally compelled to believe
this ticket to be a loser is in its own way de
re unresponsive as it manifests the same commitment to go against the
things that our epistemic standards care about.

Here's one lesson to take from this.If we start by helping themselves to evidence
and possession and try to work from there to construct a theory of rational
belief on which the stuff that makes rational belief rational is some formal
relation between the rational belief and the elements that support it, we face
a difficulty.It seems that evidence
that something shows real insight, understanding, proper sensibility, and
responsiveness might be misleading. Thus, we have to choose between a view on
which such things don't matter to rationality or we have to argue that the
evidence cannot be misleading because the evidence for thinking something is
insightful or shows proper sensitivity just makes
something insightful or properly sensitive.Neither option is palatable.

The
worry can be put like this. Take a view on which actual rational insight or
understanding is a necessary precondition for having rational beliefs about what
rationality requires from you. To rationally believe, say, that you shouldn't
violate the enkratic requirement or shouldn't believe lottery propositions, a
merely apparent rational insight won't do.We need a genuine insight and genuine understanding.Some will object to such a view on the
grounds that a merely apparent rational insight should have some rational force
that's comparable to the rational force of a genuine one much in the way that,
say, hallucination should have comparable rational force to perception. We'll be invited to think of genuine and
merely apparent rational insight as having some sort of common character and that
it cannot be more rational to respond to the genuine rational insights than the
apparent ones.[17]

This
has to be a mistake, but where does the mistake lie? It's not in the idea that
there are mock insights.It's in the
idea that there's no rational difference between mock insight and genuine
insight.Notice, however, that we're not
going to make much headway in understanding where the difference lies until we
see how limited assets-based explanations are in epistemology. We'd be forced to fight this fight in terms
familiar from debates about the rational role of experience and the
significance of error cases and find something that's an aspect of genuine
insight that's lacking from a mock insight.This is the wrong way to approach the issue. The difference between
sensory error and the errors about rationality's requirements are clearer when
we think about the role of value.In the case of sensory error, your beliefs
don't manifest any sort of de re
unresponsiveness.They don't show that
you're bad at understanding what reasons require of you, only that you
sometimes make mistakes about which reasons there are that place demands on
you.In the case of mock insight, you're
committing yourself to something perverse, something bad, something untoward
and revealing that your values are out of line with the things that
epistemology cares about.It's perverse
to care about things that epistemology takes to be worthless or to fail to
respect the things that epistemology values and then to insist that you care
about epistemology's approval.

We'll
see that the formal approach to rationality that the evidentialist takes is
bankrupt if we think about things like the rational relations between beliefs,
actions, and emotions.Foley (2001) once
defended the view that epistemic rationality plays a foundational role in the
overall theory of rationality because, he said, if you rationally believe
rationality requires you to feel, think, or do, rationality just will permit feeling,
thinking, or so doing.If you rationally
judge that rationality requires being angry or going to the left, the features
of your perspective that make the belief rational ensure that the emotion or
action is rational, too.

It's
clear now that if we think of a subject's perspective as a collection of mental
states that make things seem to her a certain way, this model isn't very good,
not if you think that the rationality of being angry about something depends
upon whether it's anger directed at a fitting object. Your evidence could
provide arbitrarily strong support for a theory of fitting objects of anger
according to which it's appropriate to be angry about things like the happiness
of children or the equitable distribution of resources, but it's not fitting to
be angry about such things. If fittingness is connected to rationality, the
rationality of an emotional response can't be wholly determined by the stuff
that Foley thinks makes for rational belief. Either rationality of emotion has
nothing to do with whether the emotional response is appropriate or he has to
admit that he got things the wrong way around. If indeed there's a nexus and
the rationality of a belief is connected to the rational standing of the stuff
that beliefs rationalize, he has to see that the determinants of epistemic
rationality aren't just features of your perspective but also includes the
features of things that determine what response is fitting.

If
we apply this now back to belief, we might think that something similar holds
for belief. Certain beliefs are appropriate responses to epistemic situations,
situations that we characterize in terms of a subject's perspective on the
world.Just as certain beliefs won't be
fitting in certain epistemic situations, certain beliefs about what rationality
requires of you will be constrained by features of the epistemic situation, not
your take on it.

Foley,
R. 2001. The Foundational Role of Epistemology in a General Theory of Rationality.
In A. Fairweather and L. Zagzebski (eds.), Virtue Epistemology: Essays on
Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility. Oxford University Press, pp. 214– 31.

[5] It doesn't seem terribly plausible to
deny (1) because there are things that we rationally believe about rationality.
If this fact isn't itself trouble for the evidentialist, then we often have
sufficient evidence to believe things about rationality. If we can have strong
evidence to believe things about rationality, it seems that somebody could have
strong evidence for L.

[6] Feldman (2005), Foley (2001) and Gibbons
(2014) are the two writers who seem to be the most sympathetic to perspectivism
in the literature. Broome (2013), Greco (forthcoming), Horowitz (forthcoming),
Ichikawa and Jarvis (2013), and Smithies (2012) defend the enkratic requirement
and/or fixed-point thesis for justification or rationality, but it's not clear
whether they should be classified as perspectivists or objectivists.

[7] See Titelbaum (forthcoming, forthcoming
b) where he shows how the fixed-point thesis can be derived from the enkratic
requirement. He doesn't offer much defense of the enkratic requirement, but I
offer an argument and explanation below.

[8] See Coates (2012) and Lasonen-Aarnio
(MS.) for defenses of incoherentism.

[9] Titelbaum (forthcoming, forthcoming b) seems
to be an objectivist. Littlejohn (2012)
and Sutton (2007) defend similar views concerning justification, but not for rationality.

[10] See Gibbons (2014). I think Foley (2001)
is also sympathetic to this line of argument. Fantl and McGrath (2009) offer a
similar argument for internalism about justification.

[11] Once we see why Feldman's argument for
perspectivism isn't a goer, perspectivists shouldn't be tempted to think that
some formal or structural relationship is in place so that the evidence that
supports higher-order beliefs provides sufficiently strong support for
lower-order attitudes. So, while they might not describe their view as a view
on which attitudes about rationality make lower-order beliefs rational, they
really can't say that such higher-order beliefs merely ensure that there's
sufficient support for lower-order attitudes.

[13] The incoherentist shouldn't think that
it matters whether the subject knows that she doesn't believe p.The evidentialist view seems to predict that there will be
counterexamples to the enkratic requirement even when the subject knows that
she doesn't believe p.

[15] I have worries about the intelligibility thesis, too. If
the intelligibility of responding to a rational requirement requires registering that there's something in
the situation that merits the response, the intelligibility thesis implies that
those who don't have the proper sensitivity or understanding won't be bound by
the (putative) rational requirement because they lack what's needed to register
its significance. This implies, in turn, that the requirement isn't categorical
for it applies only to those who can appreciate its rational force.If our
conception of rational requirements is, however, the conception of requirements
that have rational authority for all rational creatures, the intelligibility
thesis needs to be seriously modified. Once modified, I doubt that the modified
thesis would support the argument for perspectivism.